So it seemed better to him suddenly not to say the words himself in spite of the new times. This would be a sort of new and yet an old way, and the maid, being so young yet, might like it more, too. All this Yuan thought, and he said to the lady very eagerly, “Will you speak for me, my mother? It is true she is very young. It may be if I speak it would frighten her—”
At this the lady smiled a little and she gazed with some tenderness at Yuan and answered, “If she wants to marry you, my son, let it be so, if your father will let it be. But I will not compel her. That one thing I will never do — compel a maid to any man. It is the only great new good these times have brought to women — that they need not be compelled to marriage.”
“No, no—” cried Yuan.
But he did not dream the maid would need compelling, because it is natural for all maids to wed.
Now while they talked and finished the meal as they did, Mei-ling came in, very fresh and clean to see in her robe of a dark blue silk she wore to school, and her short straight black hair brushed behind her ears and no jewels in her ears or on her hands, such as Ai-lan must always wear or feel herself unclothed. Her look was quiet, the eyes cool and steady, and her mouth curved and not very red in hue, as Ai-lan’s always was, and her cheeks pale and smooth. Yet though Mei-ling was never ruddy, she had always a clear gold skin which was full of health, it was so fine and smooth. Now she gave greeting courteously, and Yuan saw the night’s sleep had taken the yesterday’s distress away from her, so that she was tranquil again and ready for this day.
Even as he watched her seat herself and take up her bowl to eat, the lady began to speak out, a small half smile upon her lips and in her eyes. Suddenly if Yuan could have stopped her or chosen another hour, he would have done so. He wished any how to put the moment off, and a shyness rushed upon him and he dropped his eyes and sat all hot with misery. But the lady said, and the secret smile was shining in her eyes now for she saw how Yuan was, “Child, here is a question I have to put to you. This young man, this Yuan, for all he is a mighty modern and will choose his wife, turns weak at the last moment and goes back to old ways and asks a go-between after all. And I am the go-between, and you are the maid, and will you have him?”
As baldly as this the lady put it, in a very dry bald voice, and Yuan almost hated her because it seemed to him it could not have been worse done, and enough to frighten any maid.
And Mei-ling was frightened. She set her bowl down carefully and put her chopsticks down and stared at the lady in a panic. Then in a very small low voice she whispered, “Must I do it?”
“No, child,” the lady answered and now she was grave. “You need not if you do not wish it.”
“Then I will not,” the maid answered joyfully, her face all lit with her relief. And then she said again, “There have been others of my schoolmates who have to wed, mother, and they weep and weep because they must leave school to wed. And so I was frightened. Ah, I thank you, mother,” and this young woman Mei-ling, who was always so quiet and contained, rose quickly from her seat and went and fell before the lady in the old obeisance of gratitude and bowed herself down. But the lady lifted her up and held her by an arm about her.
Then the lady’s eyes fell on Yuan, and there he sat, his hot blood all flying from his face and leaving him pale, his very lips pale that he bit between his teeth to hold them still, for he would not weep. And the lady pitied him, and she said kindly, looking at the girl, “Still, you like our Yuan, Mei-ling?”
And the girl answered quickly, “Oh, yes, he is my brother. I like him, but not to wed. I do not want to wed, mother. I want to finish school and be a doctor. I want to learn and learn. Every woman weds. I do not want only to wed and take care of a house and children. I have set my heart to be a doctor!”
Now when Mei-ling said these words, the lady looked at Yuan in a sort of triumph. And Yuan looking back at the two women, felt them leagued against him, women leagued against a man, and he could not bear it. There was something good about the old ways, after all, for it was the natural right thing that women should be wed and bear children and Mei-ling ought to want to marry, and there was some perversion in her that she would not. He thought to himself, angry in his manhood against these women, “It is a strange thing if women are like this nowadays! Whoever heard of a girl not marrying when the time comes? A very strange thing if young women are not to wed — a sorry thing for the nation and the next generation!” He thought, after all, how foolish even wisest women are, and he looked and met Mei-ling’s calm eyes and for once he thought them hard and cold to be so calm and sure, and he looked at her angrily. But the lady answered for her very certainly, “She shall not marry until she wishes. She shall use her own life as seems best to her, and you must bear it, Yuan.”
And the two women looked at him, even hostile in their new freedom, the younger held within the circle of the elder’s arm. … Yes, he must bear it!
Later in that gloomy day Yuan left his room where he had thrown himself upon the bed, and he went wandering through the streets, his mind all confusion once again. He had even wept and wept in his distress, and his heart sat in his side aching with an actual pain, as though it had been too hot and now was too cold and could not beat as it should.
What should he do now? Yuan asked himself in dreariness. Here and there about the streets he wandered, pushed and pushing, and seeing no one. … Well, and if joy was gone, his duty still remained. There was the debt he owed. At least alone he could fulfill his debt. He had his old father left to think of and he cast about to think what he could do, and where find a place to work and live, and save his wage to pay his debt. He would do his duty, he said to himself, and felt himself most hardly used.
So the day wore on and he wandered everywhere throughout that whole city, and it grew hateful to him. He hated all its foreignness, the foreign faces on the streets, the foreign garments even his own kind wore, the very garb upon his own body. It seemed to him at this one hour at least that old ways were better. He cried furiously to his cold, stopped heart, “It is these foreign ways that set our women to all this stubbornness and talk of freedom, so that they set nature aside and live like nuns or courtesans!” And he remembered with a special hatred that landlady’s daughter and her lewdness and Mary, whose lips had been too ready, and he blamed even them. At last he looked at every foreign female that he passed with such hatred that he could not bear them and he muttered, “I will get out of this city somehow. I will go away where I shall see nothing foreign and nothing new and live and find my life there in my own country. I wish I had not gone abroad! I wish I had never left the earthen house!”
And suddenly he bethought himself of that old farmer whom he once knew, who had taught him how to wield a hoe. He would go there and see that man and feel his own kind again, not tainted with these foreigners and all their ways.
At once he struck aside and took a public vehicle to hasten on his way, and when the vehicle was gone as far as it would, he walked on. Very far he walked that day searching for the land he once had planted and for the farmer and his home. But he could not find it until nearly evening, for the streets were changed and built up and full of people. When he reached at last the place he knew and recognized, there was no land to plant. There on the earth which only a few years ago had borne so fertilely, where the farmer had been proud to say his family had lived for a hundred years, now stood a factory for weaving silk. It was a great new thing, large as a village used to be, and the bricks new and red and many windows shone upon its roofs, and from its chimneys the black smoke gushed. Even as Yuan stood and looked at it, a shrieking whistle blew, the iron gates sprang open, and out of their vastness came a slow thick stream of men and women and little children, spent with their day’s labor and with the knowledge of tomorrow’s day to come and many days and many days which they must live like this one. Their clothes were drenched with sweat, and about them hung the vile stench of the dead worms in the cocoons from which the silk was wound.